


The Widening Gyre

by kangeiko



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-17
Updated: 2007-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-07 18:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things fall apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Widening Gyre

He'd somehow missed Yeats the first time round. He'd been too busy slumping into the gutter to pay much attention to any of the new writers emerging from Eire - Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, enumerated in history and completely missed by Angel and Angelus both. It's the latter that rankles the most: Angelus, even at his most bloodthirsty, had always had a bit of the poet in him. It's one of the few reasons he had tolerated William's incessant prattle those first few years; that, and the sparks in the boy's eyes whenever he'd found a budding young poet to feast on. Then, he would have taken the time for _Ulysses_; for _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. He would have read them aloud to Dru, his accent thickening over the vowels, one eye on William watching resentfully from a corner. Somehow the love of poetry had been leached away from him with the poet's blood he had tasted. When _The Second Coming_ had first come out, it had been a few bare years after the end of the Great War and he had been too busy running across the Continent and the Atlantic to pay much attention. Instead, it wasn't until the fourth, maybe fifth edition of the slim little volume that he sat in his dingy little apartment and read Yeats by the flickering lamplight.

Angelus would have loved it; might even have spared Yeats on the basis on such poetry. (William would have pitched a fit if he'd eaten anyone mooning after Keats, at any rate, and wasn't he an indulgent Sire?) Angelus would have - well. Moot point, because Angel had closed the book carefully and stared out into the night for a very long time.

As Angel and as Angelus he has seen thirteen wars - not counting Vietnam - and none have taken his words away. None have accomplished what this not-war, this almost-war, has managed in one silly little song. Lorne, he knows, is terrified of what he saw in Cordelia's (in their) future, so terrified he could not articulate it. _Lost for words,_ Angel thought, anticipation clenching inside him. And, later, watching as Cordelia stepped back to his son's side, he felt himself similarly struck dumb. _Things fall apart,_ he wanted to tell her; to tell them. _I knew that this was coming._

Except, of course, that he hadn't. Thirteen wars and counting, and he had never been able to see their storm clouds gather. Not even here, in his son's battered little room, with the battered low bed and the tangled blankets where they had been sleeping.

Above Connor's head the stuffed corpses of birds of prey line the walls; if he squints a little, the bodies would blur together, as if in flight.

*

fin


End file.
